Or of the shade of golden flowers,
Such as we fetch from eastern bowers,
To mock this murky clime of ours?
Upwards, downwards now ye glance,
Weaving many a mazy dance,
Seeming still to grow in size
When ye would elude our eyes
Pretty creatures! we might deem
Ye were happy as ye seem

As gay, as gamesome, and as blithe,
As light, as loving, and as lithe,
As gladly earnest in your play,
As when ye gleamed in far Cathay.

And, yet, since on this hapless earth
There's small sincerity in mirth,
And laughter oft is but an art
To drown the outcry of the heart;
It may be that your ceaseless gambols,
Your wheelings, dartings, divings, rambles,
Your restless roving round and round
The circuit of your crystal bound
Is but the task of weary pain,
An endless labour, dull and vain;
And while your forms are gaily shining,
Your little lives are inly pining!

Nay but still I fain would dream

That ye are happy as ye seem.

Derwent Coleridge entered the church, and for some time instructed a small number of boys, among whom was young Charles Kingsley, the future poet and novelist. Besides writing a memoir of his brother Hartley, and a series of sermons, he annotated some of his father's works. His sister Sara published a fairy tale called Phantasmion, and some other instructive works for the young. She married her cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, a Chancery barrister, and died in 1852.

William Wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland. In 1798 he published the Lyrical Ballads in conjunction with Coleridge; in 1814 he produced his principal poem, the Excursion; and in

the next year the White Doe of Rylstone, which was soon followed by Peter Bell, and other poems. All these, however, were coldly received, and it was only between 1830 and 1840 that his poetry began to be generally relished. On the death of Southey in 1843, he was made Poet-Laureate, and from that time he rose so rapidly and so high in public estimation, that he gave a tone to all the serious poetry that appeared till Swinburne published his Atalanta. The aim and plan of the present volume forbid us to enter into a disquisition on the merits and demerits of Wordsworth, which have been amply canvassed in many other works; hence we shall merely quote a few of what we consider his happiest or his most characteristic verses:

THE RAINBOW.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

EARLY MORNING IN LONDON.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky.

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air,
Never did sun more beautifully steep,
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

PRISON THOUGHTS OF MARY STUART.

As the cold aspect of a sunless way

Strikes through the traveller's frame with deadlier chill,
Oft as appears a grove, or obvious hill,
Glistening with unparticipated ray,

Or shining slope where he must never stray;
So joys, remembered without wish or will,
Sharpen the keenest edge of present ill,
On the crushed heart a heavier burthen lay.

Just Heaven, contract the compass of my mind
To fit proportion with my altered state!
Quench those felicities whose light I find
Reflected in my bosom all too late!

Oh, be my spirit, like my thraldom, strait;
And, like mine eyes that stream with sorrow, blind!

MILTON.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.
England hath need of thee; she is a fen
Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh, raise us up, return to us again;

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

EARLY SPRING.

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths.

And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

Belonging

The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:
But the least motion which they made,
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;

And I must think, do all I can,

That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

James Montgomery.

The highly esteemed poet, James Montgomery, the author of the World before the Flood, Greenland, and Pelican Island, was born at Irvine, in Ayrshire, in the year 1771, and he survived till 1854. He was the son of a clergyman and missionary, and all he has written is pervaded by a deep but happy and hopeful religious conviction. We subjoin his beautiful description of the Nautilus in Pelican Island:

Light as a flake of foam upon the wind,

Keel-upward from the deep emerged a shell,
Shaped like the moon ere half her horn is filled;
Fraught with young life, it righted as it rose,
And moved at will along the yielding water.
The native pilot of this little bark

Put out a tier of oars on either side,
Spread to the wafting breeze a twofold sail,
And mounted up and glided down the billow.

In happy freedom, pleased to feel the air,
And wander in the luxury of light,
Worth all the dead creation, in that hour,
To me appeared this lonely Nautilus,

My fellow-being, like myself alive.

Entranced in contemplation, vague yet sweet,

I watched its vagrant course and rippling wake,
Till I forgot the sun amidst the heavens.

His picture of the eternal ice-fields and the stupendous icebergs in the Arctic regions, in his fine poem of Greenland, is equally correct and still more majestic:

Piled on a hundred arches, ridge by ridge,
O'er fixed and fluids strides the alpine bridge,
Whose blocks of sapphire seem to mortal eye
Hewn from cerulean quarries in the sky;
With glacier battlements that crowd the spheres,
The slow creation of six thousand years,
Amidst immensity it towers sublime,

Winter's eternal palace, built by Time:
All human structures by his touch are borne
Down to the dust; mountains themselves are worn
With his light footsteps; here for ever grows,
Amid the region of unmelting snows,

A monument; where every flake that falls
Gives adamantine firmness to the walls.
The sun beholds no mirror in his race
That shows a brighter image of his face;
The stars, in their nocturnal vigils, rest
Like signal-fires on its illumined crest;

The gliding moon around the ramparts wheels,
And all its magic lights and shades reveals.

Montgomery's verses on Night have been often quoted, and are justly admired:

NIGHT.

Night is the time for rest;

How sweet, when labours close,
To gather round an aching breast

The curtain of repose,

Stretch the tired limbs, and lay the head

Upon our own delightful bed!

Night is the time for dreams;

The gay romance of life,

When truth that is and truth that seems

Blend in fantastic strife;

Ah! visions less beguiling far

Than waking dreams by daylight are!

Night is the time for toil;

To plough the classic field,

Intent to find the buried spoil

Its wealthy furrows yield;

Till all is ours that sages taught,
That poets sang or heroes wrought.

Night is the time to weep;

To wet with unseen tears

Those graves of memory where sleep
The joys of other years;